Today we’re excited to be connecting with Jim Harper again. We’re excited to feature one of their products in our gift guide – learn more below and we encourage you to use your gift budget to support small businesses & creatives whenever possible.

Jim, we loved learning your story, but I think our audience is going to appreciate learning about the product side of your story as well. So, maybe you can help bring everyone up to speed?
In late 2019, my close friend Chris Ryan, who owns Once Films and runs STL,ORG, came to me with the concept of doing a large book on the work of St. Louis artist Tom Huck, one of the most well-known living printmakers. His work is in the National Museum and the Met, he’s done commercial work for The Roots (phrenology), Motorhead and Frank Zappa, and pushes the boundaries on both process and subject matter. Not only his artistry, but his meticulous detail make viewers stare and study his work when it’s displayed.

While Tom had been approached before, we bonded over our parents taking us to KISS concerts as kids, Star Wars and Metal.

We agreed to make and publish the book under our moniker Fine Print Small Press, and began concepting the book. We felt that Tom’s work was too important to not have a full-scale art book about it. Plus the rarity of his work and the limited production and quality makes it very difficult for people to find and view his work. We thought a book was a logical thing to exist.

Do you remember the moment you realized the world needed this product?
I remember seeing Tom’s work at a building in downtown St. Louis and just studying it. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. The faces in the print haunted me (The Bloody Bucket, Ultimate Cock Fighting), and the marks and detail blew my mind. I immediately started researching his work, and seeking it out. I found out in order to see his work, I had to hunt it down locally in private collections or public spaces, and I still only found a few in a few restaurants and gallery collections.

My partner at FPSP, Chris knew Tom and later came to me with this concept. I was so excited to start, so we met with Tom and planned things like:
• Photography of the work
• Style of the book
• Writing of the book
• Who could write the foreword
• How to sell it
• Launch

We are not traditional publishers, so we treated it like a passion project, and a few months after kicking it off, the world shut down as part of the pandemic. We continued to work via Zoom.

How do most people hear about your product?
We were lucky enough to finish the book and get the book printed in time to launch at the Met in NYC, who were buying Tom’s new piece, the Monkey Mountain Kronikle, which was finished after the production of the book. Not only did we do a book signing there, but Tom brought in a printing press and did demos for print week in New York.

Tom has a large following both in art circles and online, so once launched and we had the kickoff in both New York and St. Louis, tom’s base was so supportive about the book. We also had a kickoff in St. Louis at a venue called Work and Leisure in both our hometown, and did a signing there. Besides that traditional means, we sold books at signings in multiple cities, and still sell at gallery openings he has, and support his appearances anywhere travel allows.

Our focus is announcing appearances on our social media sites and on Tom’s. We also focus on gallery shops and specialty locations, and even though we had a strong launch, this book has an infinite shelf life because it’s a retrospective of Tom’s entire career so far, and he’s very relevant and still very visible and productive.

It’s a 12×12 (fits in with your vinyl) 300 plus page, debossed coffee table book, a beautiful gift piece and a gorgeous book to add to your collection.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers about your product or brand?
Tom Hück: The Devil is in the Details, written by Greg Kessler with a foreword by Monte Beauchamp. Tom is an American printmaker best known for his large-scale satirical woodcuts. Tom is seen as one of the world’s most significant printmakers with a unique story to tell, and his work has been hailed as controversially awesome.

This book is the first retrospective of Hück’s design. It compiles not only his finished work but glimpses into his process and the evolution of his ideas from notebook to, in the case of works such as The Transformation of Brandy Baghead, over fifty square feet of carved wood and paper.

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS, by Fine Print Small Press.
This is a 12”x12” coffee table book. 336+ pages
Black Burnished Cover Hardbound
ISBN: 979-8-9868274-0-7
Published by Fine Print Small Press – St. Louis
Photography by Chris Ryan of Once Films
Book Design by Jim Harper of Harper’s Bizarre
Edited by Andrew Doty at Editwright

Image Credits
Photos by Chris Ryan and Jim Harper